The widespread deployment of facsimile terminals (including facsimile boards in processors) has constrained organizations, such as insurance companies that receive a large volume and a great variety of form-based facsimile messages processed at geographically dispersed locations, to choose between two unappealing solutions. To wit, these organizations must require their customers who transmit facsimile messages to them, to either know the correct destination for the message, or to send the message to a facsimile terminal at a central location where messages are sorted based on their content and redistributed to the correct destination. The first option forces a customer to remember the specific facsimile phone number associated with each specific type of form but offers the distinct advantage of immediate processing of the received information. The second option spares customers the inconvenience of dealing with multiple fax numbers, but introduces an undue delay in the processing of the received information caused by the sorting and rerouting tasks at the central site.
In an effort to improve the sorting and processing of facsimile-based messages, a system, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,566,127 issued on Jan. 21, 1986 to Kunibiko et al., presents a technique for combining the functions of a facsimile terminal and an optical character recognition unit in a processor to generate reports compiling and summarizing information received by one facsimile terminal from a plurality of facsimile senders. While the Kunibiko et al. technique improved the processing of facsimile messages for a specific group of facsimile users, it neither addressed the general delivery and processing needs of organizations with geographically dispersed processing centers, nor considered routing of facsimile messages based on the content of those messages.